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Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming

For many years, the battle over what to think and do about human-caused climate change and fossil fuels has been waged mostly as a yelling match between the political and environmental left and the right.

The left says global warming is a real-time crisis requiring swift curbs on smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat, and that big oil, big coal and antiregulatory conservatives are trashing the planet.

The right says global warming is somewhere between a hoax and a minor irritant, and argues that liberals’ thirst for top-down regulations will drive American wealth to developing countries and turn off the fossil-fueled engine powering the economy.

Some books mirror the divide, like the recent “Field Notes from a Catastrophe,” built on a trio of articles in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert, and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming” by Chris Horner, a lawyer for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Ms. Kolbert sounds a strong warning call, and Mr. Horner’s book fits with the position of the institute, a libertarian and largely industry-backed group that strongly opposes limits on greenhouse gases.

But in three other recent books, there seems to be a bit of a warming trend between the two camps. Instead of bashing old foes, the authors, all influential voices in the climate debate with roots on the left or the right, tend to chide their own political brethren and urge a move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy.

All have received mixed reviews and generated heated Internet debate — perhaps because they do not bolster any one agenda in a world where energy and environmental policies are still forged mainly in the same way Doctor Dolittle’s two-headed pushmi-pullyu walked. (It didn’t move much.)

One such book comes from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of the most polarizing forces in politics a decade ago.

In “A Contract With the Earth,” Mr. Gingrich, with his co-author Terry L. Maple (a professor of psychology at Georgia Tech and president of the Palm Beach Zoo), has written a manifesto challenging conservatives not just to grudgingly accept, but to embrace, the idea that a healthy environment is necessary for a healthy democracy and economy.

They call for America to lead in moving to a world where “fossil fuels have been largely modified for carbon recycling or replaced by carbon-neutral alternatives.”

The book does reveal in spots Mr. Gingrich’s disdain for what he calls liberals’ failed reliance on legislation and litigation in environmental protection. It is all about carrots, like tax incentives, and nowhere about sticks, like binding emissions limits.

But for the most part it is aimed at conservatives, urging them to embrace their inner Teddy Roosevelt and craft a new “entrepreneurial environmentalism.”

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Andrea Ventura

The book won over Edward O. Wilson, the prize-winning conservation biologist and author, sufficiently that he wrote a foreword calling the authors “realists and visionaries.”

While Mr. Gingrich is beckoning the right to come to the middle, a similar plea has been sent out to the left by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in “Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.”

This pair of young environmental thinkers, a political strategist and a social scientist, respectively, shook up the green movement in 2004 with an essay called “The Death of Environmentalism,” which provided a launching pad for the book. They say traditional regulatory approaches and dark environmental messages — like the “planetary emergency” at the heart of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the book by former Vice President Al Gore and the subject of a film — will fail if applied to global warming.

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Instead they call for an aggressive effort to invest in energy research, while also building societies that can be resilient in the face of the warming that is already unavoidable.

In a recent interview, Mr. Shellenberger reprised a central point of the essay and book. “Martin Luther King didn’t give the ‘I have a nightmare’ speech, he gave an ‘I have a dream’ speech,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “We need a politics that is positive and that inspires people around an exciting and inspiring vision.”

In this same centrist camp sits Bjorn Lomborg. A Danish statistician, Mr. Lomborg has made a career out of challenging the scariest scenarios of environmentalists and argues for a practical calculus weighing problems like poverty, disease and climate against one another to determine how to invest limited resources.

His first book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” put him on Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in 2004 and made him a star among conservative politicians and editorial boards.

In his short new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” Mr. Lomborg reprises his earlier argument with a tighter focus. He tries to puncture more of what he says are environmental myths, like the imminent demise of polar bears. (Most bear biologists have never said the species is doomed but do see populations shrinking significantly in a melting Arctic.)

Like almost everyone these days, Mr. Lomborg says rich countries should spend far more on basic energy research.

Unlike Mr. Gingrich, who opposes a tax or binding cap on greenhouse gases, Mr. Lomborg supports putting a price on emissions, although he says the right price is a tax of $2 to $14 on a ton of carbon dioxide — about the equivalent of a 2- to 14-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax.

This is much lower than the cost most environmental scientists say would be necessary to induce companies to shift to less-polluting technologies.

In the end, the books overlap most in their embrace of the idea that the human influence on climate requires a concerted response, but that the rhetoric of catastrophe is unlikely to motivate that response.

Mr. Shellenberger and Mr. Nordhaus say one necessary step is to jettison the idea of a sacred nature separate from human affairs. In a line that is bound to inflame as many readers as it inspires, they said: “Whether we like it or not, humans have become the meaning of the earth.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page F2 of the New York edition with the headline: Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe